In the area of industrial automation technology and, in particular, in the field of numerically controlled processing machines, manufacturers offer service in the form of control technology and corresponding software components for other manufacturers of original accessories (Original Equipment Manufacturer, OEM), who manufacture and market industrial processing machines.
Such OEMs generally have good relationships with their end-customers, who are often themselves manufacturers of accessories and operate the machines and their accessories acquired from the OEMs.
Such OEMs not only develop and market goods such as machine tools, but, going beyond this, also offer service for the products which they and others sell to end-customers. Since the marketed products are generally highly complex, there are high requirements for, and difficulties in, the provision of such services, for which a large amount of information is needed with reference to the operation of their machine tools.
The significant difficulties in the provision of such services consist in obtaining access to information needed for the service of the machines to be maintained. In this case, this also concerns to a great extent items of information that have to be obtained directly from the processing process of the machine tools. Appropriate software components for such machine tools or other industrial processing machines are generally highly specialized in terms of the implementation of the actual control task. With regard to the acquisition of machine data going beyond this, however, for the reasons mentioned above, beyond the immediate control of the machine, no further machine information is conventionally provided.
For these and other reasons, manufacturers of numerical control systems and corresponding software components for industrial processing machines were not in a position to supply performance improvements on such machines to their end-customers, directly or via OEMs, on the basis of knowledge-based information.
For this reason, there is a great need, on the basis of such ongoing machine state data, primarily for maintenance and service purposes, to make services and machine-related know-how available to end-customers as quickly as possible and at any location. As a result, the availability of such machines, their lifetime and their productivity may be decisively improved.
Previously, no methods or apparatus have been disclosed on the basis of which either services or software components could be developed that would permit services based on collected machine data. These would also permit automated services that were formerly not possible to implement. Moreover, it has not previously been possible to provide services tailored specifically to the processing machine of an end-customer within a reasonable time frame, since the capacities of the service providers are generally inadequate to do so.
For this reason, it is conventional for service personnel with corresponding know-how to be dispatched to the end-customer in order to: analyze the machine, physically and manually, while on-site, and therefore primarily in response to specific requirements of the end-customers; to obtain appropriate machine data on-site; and, on this basis, to offer the corresponding maintenance or services.
In this way, however, it is not possible to offer real-time related, or particularly computationally-intensive, services such as axis analyses, for example, or other optimization, machine calibration, software services, machine data management or other dynamic intervention in the machine.
It is precisely this, however, that would be particularly important for end-customers in order for them to shorten their development times, to increase their market presence and to ensure maximum availability of the machines.